ATM Circuit Emulation with Asynchronous Clocks and Random Clock
Frequencies
Kerry W. Fendick (AT&T)
Sanjay Mithal (Lucent Technologies)*
Luis E. Morales (AT&T)
Sources of Constant Bit Rate (CBR) traffic on Asynchronous
Transfer Mode (ATM) connections typically generate ATM cells
at fixed intervals determined by the frequency of an
internal clock. Statistical multiplexers of such sources
are commonly modeled as queues that serve a superposition
of periodic arrivals with random phases. We call this the
"random phase model." For this model, the steady-state queue-
length distribution has the interpretation of an average over the
ensemble of such queues, but not necessarily over the
realization of any given queue. Indeed, in the special case
where all sources have the same period, the queue-length
process for any given queue is itself periodic, and cells
arriving from any one source after the first period always
see the same queue length. Nevertheless, the queue-length
distribution for the ensemble is commonly used to describe
the variation of delays of cells from a single source. In
this talk, we describe conditions under which
this heuristic makes sense. In particular,
we describe how small, inevitable differences in
clock frequencies result in variations in delays at any
given queue, and we describe relationships between the
random phase model and this "random frequency model". In
the process, we present some ergodic theorems for CBR
queues.
*This work was done while Sanjay Mithal was with AT&T.